Columbia University’s Secret Disciplinary Process for Students Critical of Israel

As Trump threatens sweeping action against “illegal protest” on college campuses, Columbia is already using secret processes to punish pro-Palestine students

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators march through the Columbia University campus on October 7, 2024. Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images.

In the wake of student protests last year over U.S. support for the Israeli war in Gaza, Columbia University has launched secret investigations into students for pro-Palestinian activity on campuses, including engaging in public protests or sharing material that characterizes Israel’s actions as genocide or apartheid—or even calls for halting U.S. arms sales to Israel.

Columbia’s campaign to suppress campus activism uses provisions from the Civil Rights Act—which the school interprets expansively to characterize criticism of Israel as “discriminatory harassment.” The operation is run out of a recently created office of the university called the Office of Institutional Equity (OIE), which the school has created to oversee, “the review and arbitration of all reports of discrimination and discriminatory harassment at Columbia." That office is empowered to investigate students and faculty using an opaque administrative process that can punish those found guilty of discrimination with disciplinary notifications, suspensions, loss of housing, expulsions, and even the revocation of diplomas for graduates.

Dozens of students have been targeted by the OIE over their activism on campus in recent months. Drop Site spoke to several who are currently under investigation by the office. The students said that they received notices informing them that they were under investigation, following complaints that can be submitted anonymously via a form on the OIE website. After a student receives notification they are under investigation for discrimination based on their speech, Columbia requires them to sign a non-disclosure agreement in order to see the unredacted evidence against them—effectively banning them from discussing the accusations against them or the process of the office publicly. Columbia University did not respond to a request for comment.

In a September 2024 message from Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong, the OIE was introduced to students and faculty as “a centralized resource for addressing reports of discrimination and harassment and to ensure that cases are handled fairly and expeditiously.” In practice, students at Columbia and legal advisors working on disciplinary investigations say that the office’s focus has been overwhelmingly on targeting speech critical of Israel on campus.

One student who spoke with Drop Site said that they received a notice in January informing them that they were under investigation on allegations that they had put up posters on campus criticizing Israel and inviting them to a meeting with a “case manager.”

“The posters said things like ‘Condemn Israel,’ and ‘Israel is a Terrorist State’, which I am now being told by Columbia constitutes discriminatory harassment under Civil Rights Law. If one of them had said ‘Kill Zionists’ or something like that I would understand, but they were nothing like this,” said the student who requested anonymity to discuss their case, which is still under investigation. “I interpret this as an institutional attempt to silence me with a policy that directly contradicts First Amendment rights, and to instill fear about this subject to make sure people don’t speak about Gaza or Palestine. In my meeting I made the point that it seems that I am free to criticize the U.S. government at Columbia, but not Israel, and they had no answer for this.”

Drop Site reviewed letters that students received from the OIE as part of the investigation process against them. The letters included some details of the allegations against them, including charges that they had distributed posters on campus, placed stickers on walls, or posted calls on Instagram for student walkouts from class, or criticisms of the Israeli government conduct as genocidal. Students were also accused by the OIE of directly discriminating against the dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Keren Yarhi-Milo by referring to them as “genocidal” for hosting individuals associated with Israel at the school during the war.

"Students are being pulled into these proceedings with very few due process protections and little to no transparency,” said Amy Greer, a lawyer who has worked with multiple students facing disciplinary proceedings in the OIE. The students are then asked “to defend speech like posters or stickers that say ‘Stop Arming Israel,’ or Instagram posts that call for walkouts, or art exhibitions, or a communication that simply asks for change of class time in order to attend a protest," she said.

"If the students want to even see the evidence against them, they have to sign a restrictive privacy agreement, and the OIE has thus far been unwilling to amend or alter the contract in order to make it less restrictive. Essentially this agreement amounts to both a gag order and a contract of adhesion—sign or lose your ability to meaningfully participate in the process."

The office is overseen by the provost of the school, and the staff of the OIE includes several former state district attorneys. In their definition of the OIE’s mandate, they have employed an expansive interpretation of the Civil Rights Act to prohibit speech critical of Israel that would otherwise count as protected under the First Amendment. .

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, enacted in 1964 to prevent institutions that engage in discrimination from receiving federal funds, states that “no person shall be subject to discrimination because of race, color, or national origin.” The OIE’s guidelines expand who is protected significantly to cover “citizenship or residency in a country with a dominant religion or distinct religious identity,” as well as “veteran or active military status,” as elements of membership in a “protected class.” In this interpretation, negative statements about Israel, or even membership in the Israeli military, could count as prohibited speech resulting in sanction by the university – even if no specific person is being discriminated against.

“The use of any policies that have broad, vague definitions, or that aren't clearly defined for students, faculty and the people affected, concerns us right away, because these are ripe for abuse by the school administration,” said Amanda Nordstrom, program counsel for campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). “Colleges and universities are supposed to be places where people can speak and debate freely. When institutions adopt these broad guidelines it casts a chill across campus because people don’t know what they are allowed to say, and then they just stop speaking.”

As an administrative body run by the university, the OIE has the power to both investigate and render verdicts against students based on its findings. If the OIE finds the student is guilty of discriminatory harassment, the OIE and the dean of the school will then convene separately to determine what type of punishment the student will face—outside of their presence. Students can also be subjected to provisional punishments like withholding of diplomas or suspension from campus before a finding is even made on their case.

The use of the OIE comes at a time when the Trump administration is escalating threats against schools where large protests have been led by students since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza. On Tuesday, Trump posted on Truth Social that, “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested.”

In a separate statement announcing a review of Columbia’s federal contracts this week, the Trump administration’s health and human services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, “Anti-semitism—like racism—is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” adding that ”censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence.”

In addition to creating a mechanism for anonymous complaints about individuals on campus to be submitted, the OIE’s expansive definition of discrimination can also target faculty, staff, and student workers for “failure to report”—meaning that even failing to a report an incident to the OIE that another party later deemed discriminatory could result in disciplinary measures. Students who have been called into hearings with the office say that they have been pressured to give names of other students that the office suspected to be involved in campus protest activity.

Individuals who have had disciplinary records created by the office could also have that information turned over to law enforcement and even the U.S. Congress, which has indicated an interest in regulating pro-Palestinian speech on campus and even seeking deportations and other measures against students who have engaged in speech deemed hostile to Israel. Congress has demanded that schools hand over disciplinary records of students involved in protests, amid growing pressure on schools to comply.

“What we are seeing with the OIE is Columbia trying to say that we are taking seriously claims of antisemitism, but actually just going after students who are advocating for Palestinians,” said Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at the legal advocacy organization Palestine Legal. “That's extremely dangerous, especially as students' personal information could be turned over to Congress at some point.”

While students face opaque disciplinary panels with the power to suspend and expel them from campus, or even revoke their diplomas, Columbia has continued its cozy relationship with the Israeli government, hosting former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett as a speaker this week, even as it seeks to criminalize attempts to protest such events.

In recent weeks, Columbia has announced the expulsion of a number of students for participating in protests at the school. The expulsions come amid announcements by the Department of Justice’s new task force on antisemitism that it plans to visit Columbia and several other universities that were sites of anti-Israel protest over the past year. That effort has also been supported by private sector actors that have made surveillance and targeting of students over their speech on the subject a priority.

“Anybody can go on the website of the OIE and file a complaint. They can take screenshots of posts from Instagram, photographs of art pieces, submit social media comments out of context, and even quote people without actual proof other than that someone alleges they said something,” added Greer. “We have seen a proliferation of these cases since the OIE office was opened, the complaints are just flooding in.”

Students who have been targeted by the office say that it has already had a chilling effect on campus, with school officials, many of them former prosecutors themselves, creating an official where individuals are unsure what speech may result in potentially life-altering disciplinary measures leveled by the OIE.

“This office is basically Columbia’s internal District Attorney to prosecute pro-Palestinian speech on campus. They tried prosecuting us using normal disciplinary rules, but since they found that we weren’t actually violating those rules, or that the punishment was not drastic enough, they shifted to Title VI cases,” said another student who had been placed under investigation by the OIE. “To me it is so irritating that they are using such extreme tactics to censor pro-Palestine speech, while there are actual cases of harassment and discrimination on campus that no one is paying attention to.”